In this paper, we demonstrate that disproportionate gains are possible through a simple devise for injecting inexactness or approximation into the hardware architecture of a computing system with a general purpose template including a complete memory hierarchy. The focus of the study is on energy savings possible through this approach in the context of… (More)

It is increasingly accepted that energy savings can be achieved by trading the accuracy of a computing system for energy gains &#x2014; quite often significantly. This approach is referred to as inexact or approximate computing. Given that a significant portion of the energy in a modern general purpose processor is spent on moving data to and from storage,… (More)

Inexact computing aims to compute good solutions that require considerably less resource – typically energy – compared to computing exact solutions. While inexactness is motivated by concerns derived from technology scaling and Moore’s law, there is no formal or foundational framework for reasoning about this novel approach to designing algorithms. In this… (More)